If Vic still lived at home instead of in her own place downtown, or if she even had more time between dance rehearsals, maybe Mara wouldn’t feel so responsible, so involved in her mother’s tears. There’d be two daughters to share in this. And of course, if her dad still lived here, Mara wouldn’t be responsible at all. The weeping had begun about six weeks ago and her dad had left a month ago and at that point the weeping had gotten worse. Her father and Vic had to know what was happening with Mara’s mother. But everyone in her family always called Mara “the little angel,” so maybe they thought she spread her wings and floated to some serene place while her mother cried. Maybe they thought Mara didn’t need help.
Since it was all up to her, Mara had been working to fine-tune her aural senses. That way she could better hear the sounds that had become primary in her life: doors opening and closing, and her mother’s muted tears. Mara’s method: she filled the bathtub just enough to cover her ears and then lay down. Listening through water made the unnecessary sounds go away—the cars passing on the street below, or an airplane overhead. Miraculously, it also magnified the small, necessary ones, the internal sounds. All she had to do was pay attention, and she could make out the hisses of the old couple next door arguing in Russian. She could hear the rumble of the subway that ran directly beneath their building and even, she believed, the voices of commuters talking. She could hear the walls breathe. She would lie there until her skin grew dimpled from moisture and the water began to cool and goose bumps rose on her body. Later she could hear from the other end of the apartment when her mother finally cracked open her bedroom door and quietly emerged, almost shamefacedly, as if she were tiptoeing in after curfew. Then Mara could run to join her for as long as she stayed outside the cave of her bedroom, as long as she could hold the tears at bay. Even when the door remained closed and Mara had to press herself against it for comfort, the listening exercise paid off. Sometimes, it was true, Mara couldn’t hear anything except sirens and traffic helicopters. But in general, the undertone of weeping appeared to grow louder and clearer as Mara’s hearing sharpened.
Today Mara’s mother had been shuttered in her room for the past four hours. With luck, she would come out of the bedroom, blinking as if she’d emerged from darkness, and say, “How about some scrambled eggs?” though it was way past breakfast time. Or she’d ask some question about school, though it was Sunday. Or she’d squeeze Mara’s shoulders and suggest an activity, though they wouldn’t end up actually doing it. She would smile and be cheerful, especially if the phone rang, and Mara would be grateful, but she would not be fooled. It would be a case of barely hanging on, like when Mara had to do chin-ups during gym, and before long her mother would scuttle back into the bedroom and the door would close.
She’d once overheard her dad’s racquetball partner say kids knew everything. The partner—a tall, mostly bald psychologist—often made silly pronouncements, but in this case she knew he was right. At least, partially right. Kids knew everything about their families—maybe because their families were everything for a while, the entire world squeezed into a few people and a small space. Kids had nothing else to pay attention to, so they soaked it all up. But one point the psychologist failed to make: knowing something was a long way from understanding it.
This latest weepisode, as Mara privately called them, had been touched off by a morning phone call from Mara’s father that had come as her mother was in the kitchen, putting on water to boil. Her mother gaily answered the phone and then slipped into the bedroom, pulling the door behind her slowly so it closed with a quiet but definite click, and her voice grew too low to catch, and Mara turned off the stove and then debated with herself for about two minutes before she went into the bathroom near the kitchen. An old-fashioned black candlestick phone stood on a small hand-painted table, a whimsical decorative item chosen during more cheerful times. It was the best phone, and the best location, for telephone eavesdropping. She lifted it up carefully, as she’d learned from Vic. Noiselessly, midconversation.
“Down the street, there’s this pool hall. Back Door Billiards.” Mara’s father’s voice nearly trembled with warmth and intimacy. “A restaurant at the corner sells Jamaican patties, hot and spicy.”
“For God’s sake,” Mara’s mother said, almost under her breath.
“It’s all so real, Lynne. Everything else in my life had stopped being authentic.”
“Everything?”
Mara’s father sighed. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to explain.”
“Shit,” she said.
“I’m forty-seven,” he said. “I have to look at this.” For a moment, all Mara heard was her mother strangling on her breath, and then her father spoke again. “There’s this saying around here: De higher de monkey climb, de more he expose. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I just, I saw too many monkeys climbing too high. It seems pointless now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mara’s mother said, and Mara could hear in her voice that she was wrestling with an enormous force, still winning for the moment, still calm or calm enough, but not yet the final victor. “Moving from the Upper West Side, five minutes from the office, into a small, dingy flat an hour and twenty minutes away in Brooklyn doesn’t give your life more meaning.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to say, Lynne. You’re not listening. The work, the apartment, our little neighborhood—for quite some time now, it’s all felt artificial.”
“Don,” she said, and Mara could hear that she was straining her patience to its limit, “Jamaican patties and Sunday gospels isn’t your reality. It’s not authentic to you.”
“Why couldn’t it be?”
“No. Stop.” Mara’s mother’s voice sounded like broken glass, and Mara could almost see her waving her arms. “Oh. God. Just stop.” The line was silent for a beat, and then she spoke again, and it was clear she’d begun to cry. “You think I don’t know this? How stupid do you think I am? This isn’t about goddamn authenticity. This is a lot more cliché even than that. This is about you banging that,” she caught her breath, “that Caribbean author Vic’s age—”
Mara yanked the phone away from her ear, not sure what her father meant by “authentic” or the monkeys thing but certain that she was finished listening. She quietly replaced the receiver.
Since then, lingering outside her mother’s door, she’d been thinking about how to change things for her mother—would a kitten help? Should she throw a party? Maybe buy some cupcakes at the bakery on 81st? It all seemed a bit lame. She was wishing a solution would just pop into her head, the way answers sometimes did on multiple-choice tests, when she heard a key in the door. She wondered, for a breath, if it might be her father, fresh from Brooklyn and here to talk things through with her mother. Sometimes, as her father said, her mother didn’t really listen; she seemed so lost in her own thoughts—always had, now that Mara considered it. Maybe a good set of ears from his wife was all her father needed, and he’d returned to claim it.
But of course it was not her father at the door. Her father would not simply wander back in at this point. There would be no magic wand; this was not a musical. Mara herself was going to have to figure out how to fix it.
She moved away from her mother’s bedroom door, still shuttered, and headed toward the living room. “Hey, Vic,” she called out, because only one other person had keys to their apartment.
“Mar-muffin, the angel.” Vic stood smiling in the center of the room, holding a white